Less successful is the book’s occasional dabbling with mathematics and physics. After long stretches of tense, stifled bar chat or vividly evoked physical action (no one in American letters describes working-class effort with his poetry) sudden references to “five dimensional field theory” and loose speculation about the Kennedy assassination feel insufficiently grafted onto the rest of the novel. While something such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow can fuse hard science with a distinctive prose voice, the transplant here is less convincing.

Loading

The novel comes to life most vividly when it drops this baggage and instead of gesturing towards darkness, embodies it through Bobby. As his life grows more itinerant and broken – we move from New Orleans to Tucson to Idaho and elsewhere – the scenes of his increasingly solitary life become intensely moving. Particularly touching is a long stretch later in the novel that details his life as a near-hermit, material strongly reminiscent of McCarthy’s 1979 masterpiece, Suttree.

Yet a disconnect remains. Over and over again Bobby calls out to Alicia, writes unsent letters, and hints at a deep and abiding grief, but while Western’s loss is evoked at every turn in McCarthy’s peerless, lustrous prose, we remain, for the most part, on the other side of the glass. Perhaps fittingly for a book about someone driven to stasis by mourning, the book feels inside out, forever discussing people not there, matters from the past half-explained. Both Bobby and finally the book feel a little withholding, as if we’ve been granted permission to only witness loss, without directly accessing its source.

Crucially, Alicia isn’t here, and our only access to her in The Passenger is through the unusual and semi-recurring intrusion of what read like transcribed dreams from another book. These nightmarish interludes, rendered entirely in italics, clash with the book’s dominant tone. These jokey, surreal sections are dominated by a finned, malformed miscreant known simply as “The Kid” who taunts Alicia, and for the most part they interrupt the book’s sorrowful drift without deepening our sense of her sad and schizophrenic life.

Like so much else in the book, these sections gesture towards a central mystery or solution while denying the reader a complete picture.

This absence or inaccessibility is conditional, of course. Stella Maris promises to tell Alicia’s side of the story, a perspective any reader of The Passenger will be desperate to know. Only then – or, knowing McCarthy, not even then – will we be able to understand this story as a whole. For now, the mysteries and lacunae of this current volume must suffice.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.